The following article by Allan Armstrong was a first posted on the bella caledonia blog at:- http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2017/08/04/trump-says-scotland-went-through-hell/

TRUMP SAYS, “SCOTLAND JUST WENT THROUGH HELL”. BUT THAT NOTHING COMPARED TO WHAT HE HAS PLANNED FOR US

Trump has tweeted his opposition to Scottish independence. “Is Scotland going for the vote, by the way. It would be terrible. They just went through hell”. Hell being IndyRef1, and not the Brexit campaign that contributed to the murder of Jo Cox MP, and Jacub Rusiecki, factory worker, or the suicide of 16 year old Dagmara Przybysz after racist bullying; nor the spike in physical attacks and racist harassment following the Brexit vote. Trump supported Brexit and saw his own election to the US presidency as ‘Brexit plus, plus, plus’. Continue reading “TRUMP SAYS, “SCOTLAND JUST WENT THROUGH HELL””

David Broder, now a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism, contibruted the Global Commune* events organised in Edinburgh by the RCN in 2010. David now lives in Italy and has written the following article about how socialists should relate to Trump, after the dismal experience of the Left’s response in Italy to the rise and fall of Silvio Berlusconi. We would like to thank David and Bhaskar Sunkhara, editor of the US magazine, Jacobin, for permission to post this article, which is can also be found in the current issue 24 of Jacobin.

Berlusconi and Trump drink to a Left-free future

BEING ANTI-TRUMP ISN’T ENOUGH

Just months after the left seemed poised for a historic breakthrough, a shock national vote brought a dangerous reactionary to power. Smashing open the old party of the Right, the billionaire tycoon’s populism surfed a wave of anger against the corrupt elite that had long controlled the political center. Making government the stage for a permanent public performance, this curiously wealthy popular champion radically reshaped the country’s political life.Continue reading “BEING ANTI-TRUMP ISN’T ENOUGH”

Eric Chester (RCN and IWW), who comes from the USA, uses the experience of the ‘New Deal’ Keynesian reforms to show that the neo-Keynesian ‘solutions’ advocated by so many on the Left today will be unable to resolve the current crisis of capitalism in any way that benefits the working class.

The Great Depression in the USA

The global economy is mired in the worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and yet capitalism has always been characterized by instability and insecurity. An economic system that operates without an overall plan, and in which powerful economic forces act on the basis of maximizing short-run profits, is a system that is inherently unstable. Marx predicted a collapse of capitalism leading to a revolutionary upsurge as early as the 1850s.[i] This would appear to be one of his predictions that has been contradicted by the course of history, but in fact the global economy has been plunged into one crisis after another.

The unpleasant reality we confront today is that although capitalism is constantly changing, the impact of these changes is, on balance, overwhelmingly destructive. Indeed, as capitalism grows and expands, it destroys everything in its path. As the system unravels, more and more workers become permanently displaced from the workforce; income and wealth differentials widen within the already industrialized societies, as an increasing number of countries are added to the list of “failed” nations; and ecological catastrophe threatens the continued existence of the planet as we know it. We are at a crossroads. Either the working class acts as a class and wrests power from the capitalist class, or the system will disintegrate into a catastrophic freefall.